Missed Connections - Spaceness Radio

Ooh la la. My amigo, William Rihel, created a pop-up radio station for this weekend's SPACENESS. 

SPACENESS is "a celebration of time, space and the unknown through experimental art, media and performance. Each year SPACENESS takes over the Sou'Wester Lodge in Seaview, WA, as well as the adjacent forest, seashore and wild spaces." 

Broadcasting from the main lodge at the Sou'wester, SPACENESS radio provides an out of this world FM listening experience for every moment of SPACENESS 2018. Soundscapes, Alien interviews, tunes to boogie down to while chillin in your spaceship, SPACENESS Radio FM is an independent, love powered voice of the community its named after.

Tonight at 11pm on SPACENESS Radio, I'll be reading a mashup of found Missed Connections over smooth heart jams. It will not be on the interweb or archived for future ears. Really the only way to tune in is to be there. Or be square. 

A Missed Connection excerpt for your reading pleasure:

Your beautiful smile caught my attention every time. It made me too shy to talk to you. You were making rounds with the iPad collecting data. I like the tattoo on your hand, may I buy you a drink? Friends call her V. Her name is Vanessa, Victoria or Vivian. Something like that. I saw you filling up your black Ford Fusion this morning around 8 am. You looked so hot in your khaki pants. You are our new mail carrier and I totally have a crush on you! It's so rare to have a young and stunningly pretty mail person. We had a long interaction the week before last over a pile of packages and my barking dogs! You're an aspiring Olympic speed skater and breakdancer. 

Thank you for introducing me to Kehinde Wiley. Sorry if I came off as creepy; I just want you to know you're pretty cute, and you reminded me of an old friend. I was trying to hold on to my toddler son he kept trying to run and I looked up and you were looking at me. You where my neighbor for awhile. Polish in your 40s. Would love to take you out. My missed connections are many. Please put your favorite drink in the subject line so I know you're real.

The Love Show (on the radio)

What a delight it is to host this little radio show of mine on Freeform Portland.

Today from 10am to noon (PST) I'll be in conversation with Ben Pink and Sara McCormick about The 2018 PORTLAND LOVE SHOW. The show began in February 2006 with the goal of creating a safe and engaging space to highlight the varying attitudes about all types of love. The show was initially crafted in response to the annual deluge of heterosexist, consumerist, romance-centric advertising that Americans experience each year leading up to Valentine’s Day, For this year's event, they've invited over 200 artists to make one artwork each that digs a little deeper into the mysteries of Love.

There's more about all of this, and we are going to chat about it today on the radio. Stream the show online at freeformportland.org or, if you are in Portland, you can hit us up on the dial at 90.3fm. We'll be playing love inspired tunes by Bettye Swan, Orange Juice, The Drums, Buzzcocks, Joseph, Joan Armatrading, Dntel, Widowspeak, Bill Withers and MORE. 

Oh yes! The Portland Love Show runs February 3rd-March 12th, 2018 at the Ford Gallery in PDX. 

I'll be part of this shindig too, mostly officiating marriages and divorces to those who need it. Read more about that HERE. 

Looking At - Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas is an artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. His film and video installations, photography and work in television frequently touch on the history of literature, cinema and music, while examining the "failed utopia" of modernism and obsolete technologies. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of both analog and digital technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, reimagined narratives that pertain to particular locations or past events.

For Stan Douglas‘s twelfth solo exhibition at David Zwirner, the artist debuted a new film set in a reconstruction of the Columbia 30th Street Studio. This legendary recording studio was opened in 1949 by Columbia Records in an abandoned Armenian church on East 30th Street between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan. Nicknamed “The Church,” it was home to some of the most renowned recordings of the era up until its closure in 1981, including Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979). Other artists using the studio were Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Glenn Gould, Billie Holiday, Vladimir Horowitz, and Charles Mingus, among many more, with musical genres ranging from classical to musicals, jazz, pop, and rock.